This article can be considered a casual piece. There is no substantial content, just some thoughts and reflections on the news of DK's arrest by the police today.
I first got involved with Terra through the anchorprotocol project, where the 20% annual interest rate on UST immediately attracted me to start mining. Around the same time, I also got into the Mirror project, which is a platform for synthetic assets. The various defi projects on Terra have indeed helped me earn a lot.
There was a time when I also studied the circular lending of UST, constantly leveraging my UST to earn higher returns. But as everyone knows, it was all just a bubble.
I had two opportunities to exit without suffering major losses, but I went back in because I trusted DK's empty promises.
At that time, the Solana ecosystem was booming, and I had already converted all my UST into other tokens for mining on Solana, including some whale tokens, parrot tokens, and Samoyed tokens. It was actually profitable to provide liquidity for these junk tokens and receive platform subsidies. Unfortunately, the Solana mining collapsed later, and after the profits retreated, I couldn't find a place in the defi market that offered higher returns than UST. So I liquidated all the tokens I had and exchanged them for UST, around the time when BTC dropped from 60,000 to over 40,000.
In fact, I missed out on Luna completely. I bought it very early, around 14u, and had a position of about 1000u. Later, because I wanted to buy a Maine Coon cat, I sold all my Luna holdings and spent over 20,000 to buy the Maine Coon cat, which is now the profile picture of my public account. So I named this cat Luna in commemoration.
Going back to the story, at that time I thought I could comfortably earn interest and wait for a good opportunity to make money with a few hundred thousand UST. But I didn't expect the Terra crash to happen.
On the day of the crash, someone in my small group gave a warning that the Curve pool had slipped by five points. Since I had experienced other crashes before and thought it was stable, I panicked and withdrew all my funds to exchange them for other stablecoins. However, I vividly remember that I made the mistake of checking DK's Twitter, where he said not to panic and that they were deploying a new four-pool, and the slip was temporary. This was the first time I acted foolishly, and I regretted believing his deceptive words and also felt sorry for the wear and tear on stablecoin cross-chain swaps, so I didn't exchange for stablecoins and instead staked them back in Anchor.
They say a person won't make the same mistake twice. When UST slipped again to around 0.85, I couldn't sleep and was determined to cut my losses. But at this time, DK revealed that he had $1 billion to support the market, which indeed caused UST to rise significantly. So for the second time, I acted foolishly and put my UST back in.
After the second mistake, I held on for two days, waiting for DK to pump the market again, thinking that this time I would definitely sell. But what I got was a rapid crash of Terra, and in the end, I sold in batches at 0.6 and 0.4 to cut my losses, and only had a small amount of UST left, which I sold in despair at around 0.1x after DK ran away. In the end, I only managed to recover about 30% of my funds.
In fact, the remaining 30% of the funds were just giving back most of the profits. Strictly speaking, during the crash in 2021, I hadn't lost my initial investment. But I never expected that I would make consecutive mistakes again, the third time being foolish, and I deposited the remaining stablecoins into AEX.
At that time, I thought it wasn't suitable to buy the dip after such a big crash. It would be better to accumulate coins first, so I put the remaining funds into AEX's stablecoin investment, which offered an annualized return of about 15%. However, less than a month after depositing, AEX also crashed.
There were no twists or turns in the AEX incident, and in the end, I sold at about 20% of the initial value and left the platform. The platform still cannot fulfill its obligations to this day. The jokes you see in the community are indeed my personal experiences. Fortunately, before the crash, I had a lot of assets locked in long-term contracts and PoS staking, so I didn't convert them into stablecoins, which at least left me with some assets in the bottom of my pocket.
To sum up the lessons, there is nothing in Web3 that is worth trusting, whether it's a dex or a cex. Now I only believe in one principle: a gentleman does not stand under a dangerous wall, and it's better to secure your gains. If I receive an airdrop, I sell it. If I receive crops, I sell them too. As for trading coins, the key is to participate.
Finally, I hope that after DK's arrest, he can squeeze out some money for compensation. It is said that he still has 10,000 BTC when he was arrested, so he can at least make up for some of the losses. Consider this article as a story for everyone to enjoy.
Author: Liu Ye Jing Hong
Public Account: Wesman Notes
Personal WeChat: liuyejinghong_
RSS3 Personal Homepage: liuye.rss3.bio
Xlog Homepage: liuyejinghong.xlog.app
Mirror: mirror.xyz/liuyejinghong.eth